Improving performance for software MPEG players

We present a technique for improving the cache memory performance for software MPEG players. We motivate this technique by first presenting a characterization of cache behavior for mpeg play and mpeg2play MPEG applications. We then apply two hardware-based prefetching techniques to improve the cache memory performance. Previously published work has focused on applications of prefetching towards only scientific applications. The prefetching technique presented eliminates approximately 80% of cache misses and potentially reduces execution time by a factor of two.